Fear factor: Writer understands what motivates

It snowed on Halloween 30 years ago.

It’s remembered in the upper Midwest, primarily in Minnesota, as the Halloween Blizzard. We had flurries in Little Rock too. I know, because I was pulling out of town as the flakes started falling, heading west into the setting sun, into the future.

I made it nine hours that night before pulling my VW Fox over in Amarillo. I slept for a few hours in a Motel 6, then. pushed on through a flat white morning into New Mexico. Sand replaced snow, the pale air turned a seizing blue.

I got bored with the interstate and turned left at Albuquerque, plunging down into New Mexico and fighting my way over the Superstition Mountains in the middle of the night. I listened to Chuck Hearn and Stu Lantz call the Lakers’ game and came down into Globe about 2 a.m. I’d planned to stop there, but it was only another hour and a half to make it to Phoenix, so I kept on.

I walked into the lobby of a downtown hotel at around 4 a.m. Howie Mandel, the comedian, was checking in at the front desk ahead of me. He had hair then. I slept a few fitful hours, got up, showered, shaved, put on a suit, and reported to my new job two days before they expected me. I was scared.

That seems silly now. I was pretty cocky 30 years ago. Phoenix New Times had been trying to hire me for more than a year; I had a couple of other offers. I considered myself a pretty hot commodity. I thought I could write nonfiction as well as almost anyone anywhere.

I had done all right. No one had exposed me as an imposter.

I didn’t think I’d ever be coming back to Arkansas or to the South. My new job came with a big office and a generous expense account; I was free to find, develop and write my stories. I could travel. If I needed to fly to the Bay Area to attend a party celebrating the release of Hell’s Angel chieftain Sonny Barger from federal prison, I could pick up a phone and ask one of our support staff to make all the arrangements. Within a couple of hours I’d have a hotel room in Oakland’s Jack London Square, a tomato red Ford Torino rental car, airplane tickets, and an envelope of cash as an advance on expenses.

All I had to do was produce. That was the thing about my new job. You did have to produce. People who didn’t got fired. Quickly.

When I got to my new place of business, one of the first things I had to do was to pick out my office. There was one I liked that was spacious and well-lit, with several windows overlooking a patch of desert. But three of my new colleagues warned me that the office had been occupied by four different writers the previous year, none of whom had lasted at New Times. The latest, they said, had lasted only a couple of weeks before hustling back to her old job as a columnist for the Deseret News.

I wasn’t superstitious, but I took the other office; the one with the single window overlooking the parking lot. And immediately got to work.

It was stressful; the newspaper always had one or two more writers on staff than it needed and there was real competition to get stories in each issue. One or two were cut each week. So at the story meetings, you not only had to pitch what you were working on, but defend it against your peers, who, in theory at least, had a vested interest in your failure.

In practice, my colleagues were generally kind, but they were quick to point out potential problems and holes in reporting. Sometimes things got heated. More than once people were brought to tears. You did not go into these story meetings unprepared; often you had the story reported before you ever dared to pitch it. Often you did work only to discover that there was insufficient reason to pursue the idea, that your theory of how things happened did not match up with the facts.

So you always had a couple of things going. I’d arrived with a couple of ideas to pursue, like the inordinate success of teenage Navajo chess players, who tended to dominate the state competition. (They’d done that story the previous year.) I wanted to look at the legacy of architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona, who’d built his winter home Taliesin West in Scottsdale.

And before I’d left Little Rock I’d had some talks with the editor about a deep dive into the ongoing investigation of the murder of nine people in a Buddhist temple west of Phoenix. I’d gotten in touch with the detectives working the case. I’d write a lot about it over the ensuing 14 months.

I did all right at New Times; I liked the people and handled the stress without resorting to the Xanax or Valium some of the other writers chewed. I got in no fistfights and only one yelling match with the editor. I never had a story not make it into an issue, and racked up more cover stories than any other writer during my time there. New Times was the first place I ever worked that cared much about awards, and I won a couple for them.

When I left 14 months later to return to Arkansas and to this newspaper, which was not yet two years old, the New Times editor came to my going-away party at the dive bar we frequented. My colleagues told me this was rare, that they’d never witnessed it before. He’d already agreed to match the offer, but as he shook my hand he told me if I changed my mind he’d have a column for me within a year.

I won’t say I wasn’t tempted. It was scary coming back to Arkansas.

People tell me it is irrational to feel perpetually nervous about whether or not my work is good enough. I’m sure people close to me get tired of what they must perceive as neediness for constant reassurance. But I still feel vulnerable. I still count my change and imagine what I might be able to do when they come to tell me it has all been a mistake, that I wasn’t what they wanted after all. I still steel myself for this eventuality. I understand what motivates me.

I have never been so far out in front That I could ever ask for what I want And have it any time

— Gene Clark of The Byrds, “Set You Free This Time”